California Trip

This 1968 photo series captured the peak of California’s counterculture; Spellbinding black-and-white images show a heady array of the state’s population: naked flower children living in communes, Watts residents still reeling from Los Angeles’s 1965 race riots, aging snowbirds taking refuge at the innovative retirement community Leisure World, and Hollywood newbies hungry for stardom. -Artsy (September, 2019)
1968 was a year of turmoil for the United States, a time of social, cultural and political upheaval. For five weeks, Stock traveled up and down the California highways, documenting the counterculture. The hippie scene was at its peak. California was then, and still is, a place many Americans looked to as a hub of innovation and progression. Now, some 50 years later, reading Stock’s introduction to “California Trip” still seems of the moment: 'Every idea that Western man explores in his pursuit of the best of all possible worlds will be searched at the head lab — California. Technological and spiritual quests vibrate throughout the state, intermingling, often creating the ethereal. … Our future is being determined in the lab out West.' -Washington Post (September, 2019)
People didn't buy Stock's book for his mind-blowing prose — they were drawn to his compelling photos. He was a master at finding the surreal in the mundane. -SF Gate (September, 2019)
From a semi-nude, long-haired couple posing naively and romantically on the back of a horse to a bunch of mystical images of beaches and natural landscapes, Dennis Stock captured California in all its glory during the hippy, free love movement in 1968 when he embarked on a five-week road trip through the sun-drenched state. This particular series was published as a book in 1970, titled California Trip, which quickly became a cult piece for book collectors. -Metal Magazine (September 10, 2019)
Stock’s representation of California is framed somewhere between the meandering remembrances of Tarantino’s blockbuster and Joan Didion’s iconic “White Album” essay full of dark memories of a time when culture fundamentally shifted. As the best documentary works do, California Trip lets us draw our own conclusions, contemplate our own prejudices, and muse over our own ideas of sun-drenched nostalgia. -Hyperallergic, Oct. 2019